Postgraduate Diploma in Museum Studies

Key facts

Further your career in the museum sector

Massey’s Postgraduate Diploma in Museum Studies will prepare you to meet the challenges of cultural organisations. contemporary museums, galleries and indigenous cultural centres face in maintaining heritage collections and delivering high quality services to communities.

What is it like?

With a Massey Postgraduate Diploma in Museum Studies, you’ll be prepared to deal with the issues that contemporary museums, galleries and indigenous cultural centres face in maintaining heritage collections and delivering high-quality community services.

Enhance your career

Your qualification can be a bridge between previous academic study and professional work in a museum, gallery or other cultural or heritage organisation. It can also be a pathway to more advanced study at master’s level. You’ll advance your knowledge of and abilities in heritage management and bicultural practices in the heritage sector, and build experience in problem solving and working in interdisciplinary teams.

A good fit if you:

Want to be more effective in your work in an organisation with a cultural or heritage focus

Evan Greensides

Bachelor of Arts (History) Postgraduate Diploma in Museum Studies

Archivist - Palmerston North Central Library

“My studies in history and museum studies opened up the doorway to a career full of interesting and meaningful projects…”

I became infatuated with the idea of museum studies after spending a week at the Whanganui Regional Museum, where my mother works. She showed me what she did, and all the collections and it sold me instantly. I signed up for Museum Studies a week later.

My studies in history and museum studies opened up the doorway to a career full of interesting and meaningful projects. For example, over the past two and a half years, I have helped to launch the Palmerston North Poppy Places project. This project is all about raising community awareness of the wartime personalities that our city streets are named after. Through research I brought to light the stories of soldiers from the 28th Maori Battlalion of World War Two.

As the archivist at the central library I was well placed to do the project as I have access to all the council minute books and decisions dating back to the 1880s.

I found it fascinating researching the lives of young men from small towns who signed up for and did military training, went to war together, and to learn of the impact on their families and communities of their absence, injuries or deaths.

If you have an interest in museums and our history I would definitely recommend the PGDip in Museum Studies. There are plenty of good museums led by very dedicated people all over New Zealand - especially the small ones. With those, you get to do everything and be a jack-of-all-trades and a master as well. You never have a boring day!

Careers

Graduates are normally employed in museums, galleries and cultural centres but may also work as heritage field officers or cultural policy advisers for government and non-government agencies.